A Short Introduction to Psycholinguistics:

Garden-Path Sentence

Department of Computer Science,

Graduate School of Information Science and Technology,

The University of Tokyo

T. SUWA

Basic Concepts – Syntax and Parsing

A big elephant squashed a small fly easily.

Basic Concepts – Syntax and Parsing

A big elephant squashed a small fly easily. A N V A N Adv

NP NP

VP

S

Syntax tree: structure of sentence

D D

Basic Concepts – Syntax and Parsing

A big elephant squashed a small fly easily. A N V A N Adv

Lexical category: classification for grammatical roles of words

D D

Basic Concepts – Syntax and Parsing

A big elephant squashed a small fly easily. A N V A N Adv

NP NP

VP

S “Sentence”

D D

Basic Concepts – Syntax and Parsing

A big elephant squashed a small fly easily. D A N V A N Adv

NP NP

VP

S “Noun Phrase” (for Subject)

“Verb Phrase”

D

Basic Concepts – Syntax and Parsing

A big elephant squashed a small fly easily. D A N V D A N Adv

NP NP

VP

S

“Determiner”

“Adjective” “Noun”

Basic Concepts – Syntax and Parsing

A big elephant squashed a small fly easily. A N V A N Adv

NP NP

VP

D D

S

“Verb”

“Noun Phrase” (for Object) “Adverb”

Basic Concepts – Syntax and Parsing

Parsing = making syntax tree from sentence

A big elephant squashed a small fly easily. A N V A N Adv

NP NP

VP

S

D D

A big elephant squashed a small fly easily.

Parse

What is a garden-path sentence?

What is a garden-path sentence?

What is a garden-path sentence?

What is a garden-path sentence?

Example

The girl told the story cried.

Example

The girl told the story cried.

Example

The girl told the story cried. N

NP

D

Example

The girl told the story cried. N V

NP

D

Example

The girl told the story cried. N V N

NP NP

D D

Example

The girl told the story cried. N V N

NP NP

VP

D D

Example

The girl told the story cried. N V

S

N

NP NP

VP

D D

Example

The girl told the story cried. N V

S

N

NP NP

VP

D D

Require correction

Example

The girl told the story cried. N V N

NP NP

D D

VP

Example

The girl told the story cried. N V N

NP

NP

D D

VP NPi V

VP

IPi

S

Fundamental Issue

Fundamental Issue

When encountering a garden-path, how do we fix temporary syntax tree?

Fundamental Issue

When encountering a garden-path, how humans correct temporary syntax tree?

Even today, this is not really

well-understood

Syntactic Ambiguity

Syntactic Ambiguity = Situation that there is more than one syntax tree for the same sentence

They discuss the violence on TV.

They discuss the violence on TV.

Usage for Linguistic Experiments

Tom painted the wall with cracks.

Tom saw the man with a telescope.

Tom painted the wall with a brush.

You can obtain strength of collocation:

Tom saw the man with a telescope.

Conclusion

Garden-path sentences are

• Interesting phenomena in itself

• Suggestive of how humans recognize sentences

• Still not well-understood

• Useful for measuring collocations between certain verb and phrase